January 2012
11 posts
1 tag
We are the soon-to-have percent!
December 2011
3 posts
November 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to...”
– Edward R. Murrow
4 tags
October 2011
1 post
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Ian MacKaye: "You can't stop music"
I just came upon a feature I wrote for Punk Planet in 2004. I was surveying independent labels as Apple was courting them for the iTunes catalog and the RIAA was just starting to sue people for downloading music they didn’t pay for.
Not surprisingly, my conversation with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye was a highlight. There are two stand out quotes. Here’s one:
“Everyone told me...
September 2011
6 posts
4 tags
2 tags
6 tags
4 tags
4 tags
2 tags
February 2011
12 posts
“Dear friend. We received your kind letter in which you condemned the American...”
– Muammar Gaddafi in a letter to a group of second-graders in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Students wrote the dictator in 1986 to ask him to stop bombing the U.S., and he replied.
(via minnpost)
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That's Easy: Mariah Carey's Office is Right...
derekg:
I wish I knew where all this glitter was coming from. I am constantly covered in it.
Perhaps one of you should pay her a visit waiving the WikiLeaks Libya cables and ask how that concert for Gaddafi’s son went! If you do this, I will pay you in candy.
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All of Gaddafi's accusations of pill-popping,...
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I don't mean to oversimplify this, but listening...
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Iraqi Day of Rage Planned for Friday, Feb. 25
thepoliticalnotebook:
It is a date being discussed in Iraq’s tea shops, on television and in the streets with varying shades of hope, fear and cynicism.
On Friday, thousands of Iraqis are planning to take to the streets for their own “day of rage,” hoping to harness the popular anger that has swept through much of the Middle East but has failed to gain much traction here.
-New York Times
...
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Gaddafi or Qaddafi? Welcome to the transliteration... →
Changing letters or words from one alphabet into the corresponding letters or words from another alphabet is called transliteration. Rendering a language from another alphabet (or from a pictographic system such as Chinese) into the Latin alphabet is called Romanization.
…The difficulty in Romanizing Arabic was illustrated in the 1980s by the multiple spellings for Libyan strongman...
The power of nonviolent struggle, and how not to... →
minnpost:
It’s hard to talk about nonviolent struggle without bringing 83-year-old political scientist Gene Sharp into the discussion. His seminal list “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action” and his book “From Dictatorship to Democracy” have inspired revolutionaries from Belgrade to Tehran, and now his work is…
January 2011
31 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Do you have family or friends in Egypt? I want to... →
Whoa! That thing I posted about Iraq? This person... →
reddragon1917:
Yes it started in Tunisia, with one simple man, Who had his lifeline stolen, his humble vegie stand. His world was filled with hunger and yearnings to be free, He struck a match which lit the flame of Arab Democracy.
Dictators and tyrants have only the one thing to fear, and it ain’t the US army with all it’s militaristic gear. They keep the warlords funded and their dictators in...
What a man and his cigarette-smoking skull...
In the late 40’s or early 50’s, one-time boxer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins wrote the lost-love lament that would become “I Put a Spell on You.”
It began as a blues ballad but was transformed in the recording studio in the mid-50’s. Hawkins claimed his producer “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version. I...
WikiLeaks spin-off OpenLeaks is now live. →
What might have been? "Unheard-of demonstration in... →